governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
India plans to be a “developed” economy by 2047 even as it navigates the economic disruptions of the energy transition. To achieve this goal, India needs consistently higher levels of growth in national income to enhance the pool of investible capital—a crucial input into development. High national income is a necessary but not a sufficient […]
Read More Aspirations must be backed by investments for the energy transitionMonetary policy that hunts with the advanced economy “hounds”—via symmetric upward adjustments in policy interest rates over the last year—and simultaneously runs with developing country “hares”—by desperately trying to revive stalling growth—has contradictions just waiting to come home to roost. That growth in India is stalling is clear from the RBI Monetary statement on 6 […]
Read More High Policy rates sans supporting fiscal policy cannot tame inflationGovernments are the biggest spenders in national economies. Global expenditure per the IFPRI SPEED 2019 database, in agriculture, communications, education, defense, health, mining, social protection, fuel and energy, and transport for 110 countries in 2015 is estimated at US$ 19.3 trillion in current terms or 26 percent of global GDP. By 2022 the average spend […]
Read More Public Spending: Cut The Fat finance Growth EnablersThe Reserve Bank of India has an impossible task. It must contain inflation without compromising growth, using four arrows in its quiver- setting domestic interest rates; managing liquidity; using its foreign exchange war chest to fight exchange rate volatility and the mandate to regulate banking operations-the last being an atypical central bank function. It can […]
Read More Monetary Policy needs a supportive fiscal PolicyIf development, or the promise of it, won the BJP its imposing political dominance in 2014 and again in 2019, is it now destiny which will maintain the inertia of electoral endorsements? Sustainable Development metrics “Development” is best measured by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals under which there are 169 targets to be achieved by […]
Read More Forget elusive growth, focus on developmentThe Pulwama massacre illustrates how porous our security architecture remains to domestic and external threats. We live in a tough neighbourhood. The geo-politics of containing the enemy through a simmering, low-level, proxy war of attrition is a fine art in South Asia and its near abroad. More boots are no substitute for hi-tech surveillance and […]
Read More Unlock India’s growth potential & make us more secure(photo credit: guns.com) An inequitable sharing of power and the “glass ceilings” of “closed order” societies, devised to keep the status quo intact, are ripe pickings for terrorism. Apologists of terror focus on this underlying social explanation for the breeding of terror. But this is cold comfort for the victims of terror who, generally, are […]
Read More Taming Terror(photo credit: http://www.deeshaa.org) The thought of Modi, an original and innovative doer if ever there was one, copying anyone, is so implausible that the first instinct is to perish the thought at birth. But it is interesting to list how Modi could “do a Deng” for India. Deng Xiaoping inherited a China wracked by the […]
Read More Can Modi Copy Deng?Indian diplomacy was at its worst last week. It conducted the PMs visit to the US as if he was attending a seminar on economics, in Neemrana. If India is a superpower (perennially waiting to happen), it came across, on the one hand, as a country sapped of all energy and squabbling about petty […]
Read More Indian Blood is Expensive
Opinion India 